Hey there parthian shot,
Just want to thank you and the team from the bottom of my heart for the incredible mod
Amazon: Total War you have made. To be honest I had followed the mod ever since its first
announcement as ATW: Reignited, it's amazing to see how the mod improved drastically from
the initial Subrosa visions, to something more immersive and of much higher quality.
You are the most dedicated modder I've ever seen, always keeping us up to date with the mod
and replying to all questions and suggestions people raised at the very first moment available.
It is through your dedication and hard work that the mod achieved it's number 1 spot on Moddb
and remained there, beating legendary mods like Third Age and others, ATW definitely deserves
this, and this is all possible because of you and the team's efforts!
However I'm having some troubles with the mod which I was wondering if you will be able to help
out. Basically would it be possible for you to release an optional download which will include
the unit textures in 256x256 resolution for those with less powerful machines?
The thing is I've been getting some serious lag with the mod lately, the game used to ran fine
for me before the RS2 landscape were implemented in, I was able to play battles with 3 stacks
or more just fine. However after that and as more and more of your amazing high quality units
are added in, the game performance dropped sharply. I'm now only able to play 1v1 battles but
not without some frequent stutterings as well.
So I was wondering if it's alright for you to release an optional lower quality texture units
for those who does not have very powerful machines, so we will be able to fully enjoy the
incredible experience this mod offers, RTW is still about large scale battles afterall.
The thing is the RTW engine is very old, it's still on dx8 and doesn't support multi-core or more
than 512mb of VRam. Therefore it doesn't take advantage of today's system to help improve game
performance. So it's best to save those extra performance whereever possible, I've already disabled
all shadows ingame to ease the CPU load. But having 512x512 texture resolution for those thousands
of units is still a heavy performance drain for me, while 256x256 textures works much better for
the engine.
So it would be great if you can provide an optional download which includes vanilla quality
textures as an extra option, both for those who have trouble running the mod smoothly or people who
prefer larger scales more than better graphics. While the official mod download should still use
the high quality ones as default.
Also, while looking at some of the unit texture files, it seems a few of them are arranged in a
way which is too "spread out", like everything should fit in a 256x256 res file just fine, however
a few parts like the head or sword are extended beyond the 256x256 border, making it a 512x512 res
file instead. This have negative impacts on performance as although the file wouldn't be more higher
quality than the 256x256 one, it is being loaded as a 512x512 texture which takes longer to load
and takes up more VRam. So it would be great if you can include some optimization on those for the
new 8.0 release, which I'm really looking forward to!
Anyway thank you and the team SO MUCH for your work on Amazon: Total War. It is amazing to see how
this fun and unique mod has improved over the years, to becoming the top Gem on moddb. This would
not have been possible without your hard work and dedication, and the great support given by the
team. So thank you all for this, and please keep up the good work!
Best Regards,
Falcon